Software release accelerates pace of product innovation

“Inspire 2018 enables designers and engineers to leverage simulation in new and inventive ways to accelerate the development of high-performance, innovative products,” said James Dagg, CTO for User Experience at Altair. “Inspire integrates well into large manufacturing enterprises for rapid simulation and lightweighting insights, and has an intuitive user experience that is ideal for small and medium-size businesses with little or no simulation experience.”

Applied at the very beginning of clean-sheet design programs and for design exploration of current production parts, Inspire simulation-driven design software allows designers and engineers to:    

• Rapidly assemble and simulate dynamic mechanical systems to automatically resolve loads on system components for optimisation and analysis
• Generate weight-efficient design proposals to specified conventional or additive manufacturing processes with Altair’s industry-leading topology optimisation technology
• Simulate the performance of competing design concepts for static loads, normal modes and buckling
• Directly export Inspire CAD geometry to 3D printers to produce high-performance, quality parts  

Andy Bartels, Inspire Program Manager explained: “In order to stay competitive while pushing the innovation envelope, simulation must drive the entire design process from the early concept design phase all the way through to production. We continue to add tools to make Inspire more beneficial to its users in each step of the design process.”

Inspire 2018 includes new advancements to:

• Generate optimised lattice and mixed solid - lattice structures, visualise simulation results in 3D, and export lattice designs in .stl file format for 3D printing.
• View and interactively assign loads to load cases and import / export design loads in .csv file format with the new Load Cases Table.
• Design for additive manufacturing with overhang shape controls to help reduce overhangs to create more self-supporting structures.
• Automatically optimise the fit of PolyNURBS CAD geometry to generative design results with the new PolyNURBS Fit Tool.

“Inspire 2018 is available immediately to clients as an application software download and later this year as a cloud-based offering,” said Dagg.  “Branded as Inspire Unlimited, the cloud offering of Inspire will include additional functionality such as secure data management, team collaboration tools, and on-demand high-performance computing (HPC).”